The typhoon season in the Philippines is far from over. Just recently, the country experienced Typhoon Ulysses and saw the devastation that it brought upon different parts of Luzon. For this reason, you have to be ready for the next typhoon, wherever you are located. Remember that with climate change already here, the width of the typhoon belt has gone bonkers; did you see the size of that last typhoon?
There are actually numerous ways to remedy your site’s being located in a flood-prone area. One is asking a professional such as an architect to think about designing it with flood proof elements. Here are some examples:
1.) Elevation
Elevation is key. We’ve discussed before how design elements of indigenous homes were functional, too. Think of the height of a bahay kubo with stilts and a bahay na bato with emphasis on elevated living spaces. This way, the lower ground area serves as a passage for water should floods happen.
2.) Rainwater catchment
If your house had a way to collect water from your downspout, such as a barrel rigged to be an alternative source of water aside from your tap, and if each house in the village where you live had this, that village has protected its residents from floods to a certain degree.
It might sound too technical but this thing is merely a barrel which stores rainwater directly from your downspout. Imagine having two of these gems in your house and you get two barrels of water when it rains. Then imagine multiplying this to 1,000 houses in your subdivision or 10,000 houses in an urban poor settlement? Instead of flooding over concrete and other non-porous materials, rainwater catchments are simple, ingenious solutions.
3.) Homemade Levees or Floodwalls
A flood wall is a primarily vertical artificial barrier designed to temporarily contain the waters of a river or other waterway which may rise to unusual levels during seasonal or extreme weather events. A levee looks like a mound and a flood wall looks like a masonry wall. You can actually make a homemade levee or flood wall at home by making a mound around your house so that when flood comes in, the water sways back and not towards your house.
4.) Dry floodproofing
Dry floodproofing is making your building dry by putting barriers around the areas where the flood can enter such as the doors, windows, etc. In other words, you make the building watertight. You can even order some of these online. Although, we do not have a standard of doing this in the Philippines yet, one way is to use watertight sealed doors, the ones used in ship compartments. The technology allows ships to stay afloat, even if one portion is breached by seawater. Essentially, sealed doors allow the rest of the ship to be waterproof even if one portion lets water in.
5.) Wet floodproofing
Wet floodproofing is similar to making your house on stilts in that there is a space under your dwelling areas that lets water pass through. However, this time, you have to dig a part of your house so that the flood passes through without entering your living space. This network is then connected to a canal or waterway.
References:
“Building Science – Flood Publications.” Building Science – Flood Publications | FEMA.gov. Accessed November 19, 2020. https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/risk-management/building-science/flood.
“Fundamentals of Resilient Design: Dry Floodproofing.” Resilient Design Institute, September 27, 2015. https://www.resilientdesign.org/fundamentals-of-resilient-design-dry-floodproofing/.
“How to Build a Levee for Flood Protection.” Disaster Company, March 4, 2019. https://www.disastercompany.com/how-to-build-a-levee-for-flood-protection/.